


Dream State

by Hopetohell



Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gore, Knives, Noncon Themes, Reader-Insert, Smut, dubcon, oblique everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 00:54:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29893173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hopetohell/pseuds/Hopetohell
Summary: You meet August in dreams. And in the manner of dreams, very little of it makes any sense.
Relationships: August Walker/You
Kudos: 1





	Dream State

This is the dream: a darkened theater where he stands on the boards and watches but never speaks. This is the tilt of his head, calculating, assessing. This is you before him on your knees, shivering, afraid but not of him (and why? Why not fear him when he’s got a face like murder and if the lamplight catches him just right there’s a thick red wound down the side of his face, angry and weeping); still he stands silent but when he turns his hand you feel it like a shot, a sharp blade between your ribs, the cold fire of the first and last kiss he’ll ever give you. 

This is the dream, again: open land and scrub pine, blue skies and there’s that fear again, that icy clench around your guts; you must cross the distance, you _must,_ but to do so is to risk more than life and limb. In the dream it’s clear that to cross these lands is to risk your soul, your anima, whatever it is inside you that makes you more than merely meat. And he stands there, August does, and he points a scarred finger toward the horizon. He opens his mouth but the words stay hidden in his throat; the meaning is plain but still you wish he’d say it. _No reward without risk._ Okay, August, but what could possibly be worth all this? 

This is you upon waking, gasping thickly around breaths that you pull inch by inch from your lungs; this is the cold wet crawling feeling of tears on your pillow. You know his name, you know his face; he’s familiar like a wool sweater itching at the back of your neck and if he’d just fucking say something—

This one is a little different. It’s a boardwalk across a salt marsh; the boards are all splinters and your hands are bound by sheaves of saltgrass, crusted white and spread wide along the rail. The blades of grass are sharp and slicing fine cuts along your wrists; fog rolls through and with it comes August like a shade, coat heavy with dew and a shining blade in his fist. And he is cruel, isn’t he, my darling? He cuts and cuts and cuts from your skin to your spirit and when you’re more blood than flesh he cuts your bonds and holds you close; he mouths the words into your open flesh but any sound is taken by the wind. 

And all of this is punctuated by a wet gasp when you wake, by frantic touches to be sure your flesh is whole, but it’s not quite fear that drives you. Oh love, you would’ve let him take even more than this, more than blood, more than pain. Do you think he knows? It’s just a little dream, _he’s_ just a dream, the face of someone on a street corner who slipped into the recesses of your mind and made his home there. 

It’s August, whoever and whatever he is. 

And maybe— maybe— 

This is August ravaging your flesh in a house where starlight shines through the fallen ceiling; he pins your hands to the floor with knives that are sharper than sharp, sharper even than his cold hard eyes shining in the half-dark. This is his unspoken question and your answer slurred in dream-speech, syrup-slow and burning. This is the call-and-answer and the sacrifice, the bond of blood to blood because somehow now his hands are under the blades as well. Now he moves in you with difficulty and desperation, without leverage, without hope, sweating and snarling. 

When you wake three fingers deep and sobbing there’s no rhyme or reason to it; it isn’t real, it isn’t real, it isn’t real. And yet. And yet your hands are aching, and yet there’s the harshness of whiskers against your neck, of splinters in your back. 

_Why won’t you tell me what’s going on? Why this, why now? Every night is stranger and stranger and I don’t understand what you want. Help me to understand._

_My darling dear, he will eat you up. He will bind you to him and rip you open; he will find every crack and crevice where he might pry you apart, where he might find himself a toehold._

(This one’s a liar and a fraud; maybe he will and maybe he won’t, but who can say? August is inscrutable and if he means you ill then why all of this? Why the bindings and the watching and the and the)

And here he pulls you from the canal, from tumbled wood and the wake of boats; here he brings you in and lays you down on rugs and furs and blankets; he gives his breath into your lungs and he takes it back. He takes it back and something else comes with it; in his teeth are fine grey wisps of something and with your spirit hanging in strings from his jaws he almost says it; the words are washed away by the sound of little lapping waves and he is heavy, so heavy. 

One more and then we’re done. One more and then he’ll say it, at last and after everything. One more chance. One more. One more. He owes you this much, at least, for how he haunts your thoughts, for how he slips inside of every dream and every fantasy, for how his silent strangeness informs the motion of your hand. 

This time, when he comes, you’re ready. You say _I’m here_ and the words are clear like bells; they peal into the darkness between trees, fetching up against him where he stands. And when he tries to turn away, to disappear into the woods, you grasp his wrist; he burns like fire, like molten wretched need, and the first sound he’s ever made, the only sound, slips free: a wet and wondering _I—_

And when you wake it’s not alone. Neither is it where you went to sleep; rain slides down the windows and August’s tongue is in your mouth. His hands are big and warm and 

_Thought you’d never get here._

_Thought you’d never let me in._


End file.
